Finally, the hearse made a left turn at a sign that said ‘Wester Balniddrie’, and progressed up a rough road to a boxy old farmhouse that was harled and painted a darker shade of sky, which is to say grey.
‘Prepare to beam down, Dr McCoy,’ Bob said, ‘and investigate new life forms.’
We drove past a front lawn that looked as if it had once been a neat tapestry of box hedges and clipped yew but was now a wilderness of nettles and rusted objects. Robin parked the hearse in a cobbled yard at the back of the house where a range of dilapidated farm buildings were huddled together trying to shelter from the weather. When we were disinterred from the confines of the hearse and its lingering afterscent of embalming fluid and chrysanthemums, I discovered that it was even colder than it had been in town. A frost had already begun to ice over the cobbles of the yard.
Bob had fallen asleep in the time it took to park and had to be winkled out of the back door of the hearse like a sleepy winter bear out of its cave.
‘Magic Bob – how’ya doing?’ Gilbert said when he caught sight of him. Gilbert was the scion of an ancient aristocratic family that had fallen somewhat into disrepute. His mother had obtained a scandalous divorce from his father which Gilbert always maintained was on account of bestiality although what I
think
he meant was that his father had been beastly to his mother. With his etiolated body and rather inbred eyes he gave the appearance of being slightly defective but he had lovely manners and was rather sweet, not to mention rich. If he hadn’t borne such a close resemblance to a beansprout I would have been happy to leave Bob for him.
‘Hey,’ Bob said to Gilbert, and the two of them wandered off together.
Shug had already disappeared, Andrea trailing on his heels like a lovesick dog. Trying to avoid Robin, I followed Terri into the house, through a disintegrating weatherboarded porch and down a freezing stone-flagged passage which was littered with boots and wellingtons, bits of bicycles, the top half of a skeleton suspended on a stand (a relic of earlier medics who had once lived here), most of the engine from a small car, the stuffed and mounted head of a stag and a jumble of demijohns and carboys – some empty, some fermenting with risky things found in hedgerows. A rack of old Irn-Bru bottles, home-corked and labelled ‘Elderflower champagne’, pointed at us in a threatening way like a broadside of light artillery. An accident waiting to happen, in my opinion.
The passage led to the kitchen, a vast room that must have once been full of warmth and farm-cooking but was now glacially cold and dominated by a huge Aga that Miranda, the current medic (a vocation that seemed to be driven more by the availability of drugs than any desire to heal the sick), was tending listlessly, like someone in a fairy story put under a spell of drudgery.
‘The dog you were with this afternoon,’ Terri said without preamble to her, ‘where is he now?’
Miranda, who looked as though she was mainlining intravenous Valium, said, ‘What dog?’
‘The dog that was following you.’
‘There was a dog following me?’ Miranda said. ‘Why?’ Terri’s interrogation of Miranda petered out eventually but not until she had completely exhausted every possibility on the Miranda/yellow dog axis: (‘Maybe he’s on your bed and you just haven’t noticed?’ ‘Maybe you’ve hidden him in your wardrobe because you don’t want anyone to see him?’ and so on). If Miranda had had more energy – she looked as asthenic as a vampire’s victim – I think she would have punched Terri.
She reluctantly offered us something to drink and Terri chose coffee which turned out to be made of oats or barley, or maybe beans, and she gagged impolitely on it. I didn’t fare much better with the tea Miranda had stewing on the hob of the Aga; the tea leaves were like iron filings and the milk in it was rank with the taste of goat.
Gilbert reappeared,
sans
Bob, but accompanied by Kevin who had materialized out of nowhere. I was surprised to see Kevin who, despite being born and bred in the countryside, was immune to its pastoral charms (‘Green, green, green – what’s the point?’). He was wearing a short brown anorak that looked as if it was left over from his trainspotting days.
Miranda had grown bored with her task now and abandoned the Aga to Gilbert’s ministrations. She shrugged on a white coat and said, ‘Obs and Gynie,’ by way of explanation.
‘Don’t forget you’re killing the goat tonight,’ Gilbert reminded her in his terrifically posh accent as she went out the door.
‘Why does it have to be me?’ she asked sullenly.
‘Because,’ Gilbert said reasonably, ‘you’re the doctor.’
The occupants of Balniddrie took turns in cooking (although Miranda was generally excused as there was a paranoid house rumour that she was overly interested in toxicology), and today was Gilbert’s day apparently.
‘At home the servants do all the cooking,’ he said, ‘so this is terrific fun.’ He opened one of the doors of the Aga to reveal a loaf of heavy dark bread proving lopsidedly. He took out a large pottery bowl and removed the rather dirty tea-towel that was covering it. ‘Yoghurt,’ he announced as if he was introducing it to us. The yoghurt smelt even more goatish than the milk and had separated into gelatinous curds and a thin wershy whey.
‘Do you think that’s what it’s supposed to be like?’ he asked Terri, who almost fell off her chair in surprise as no-one had ever previously thought to ask her a question about cooking (or indeed about anything). Rather gratified, she did her best. ‘Try jam,’ she said.
‘What a
fantastic
idea,’ Gilbert said, retrieving a jar of jam from a damp and mouldering pantry that I never wanted to see the insides of. The jam was elderberry and had retained a lot of the little twiggy stalks. It also contrived, strangely for jam, to be sour. He stirred it enthusiastically into the yoghurt.
‘I’ve got more yoghurt somewhere,’ he said, yanking open another of the Aga’s doors and finding, to his surprise, a pile of (we must hope) clean nappies.
‘They’re airing,’ Kara said, appearing in the doorway, her body sagging with the weight of Proteus on her hip.
‘Well, I didn’t think they were cooking,’ he murmured, but not so that she could hear. Gilbert’s childhood nanny had inculcated a dreadful fear of women into him, a fear that Harrow had refined into an art.
Kara sat down at the kitchen table and started breast-feeding Proteus, currently encased in a grubby Babygro. She was followed into the kitchen by another of Balniddrie’s residents, a woman called—
‘Who? Who have I done that to?’ I can see she’s having to rack her brain to come up with one but finally she says,
~ Davina.
‘Who?’
~ In the creative writing class. I bet she doesn’t appear again.
‘How much?’
~ A pound.
‘Anyway, life’s full of minor characters – milkmen, newsagents, taxi drivers. Can I go on?’
~ And what about the boy with no name?
‘No,’ I correct her, ‘it’s The Boy With No Name.’
~ Whatever, I don’t even see the point of introducing him – someone who doesn’t even exist any more. You would be as best not giving any of them names, they last for such a short time.
‘Be quiet.’
Gilbert had set about – with much banging and clattering of pans – to cook some kind of meal. This might have been lunch, it might have been dinner, I couldn’t really say – it was so very dark outside that it was impossible to tell what time of day it was and I had lost all track of time by now.
Kara inhaled on her joint as if her life depended on it. Every so often a seed exploded like a tiny pistol-shot and sent a glowing red spark skittering across the table or onto an inflammable piece of child’s clothing (which is also how accidents happen). Jill and Kara exchanged their joints. They had embarked on a heated discussion about the age at which you should stop breastfeeding. Jill favoured two years old while Kara thought you ‘should let them decide for themselves’. A decision she might live to regret when Proteus was a thirty-year-old civil servant commuting daily from Tring.
At that moment a small child lunged into the room and gave a bloodcurdling scream. I jumped up in alarm – the cry was so ghastly that for a moment I thought it must be on fire and was searching for something to throw over it. No-one else in the kitchen seemed moved by the noise, all except for Terri who stuck a surreptitious foot out and tripped the child up. It ceased the noise abruptly and I recognized it as Jill’s daughter.
‘If you’re hungry you’ll have to wait,’ Jill said to her. The child unearthed a plastic potty from under the table and threw it across the kitchen.
‘Don’t forget we’ve got to kill the goat,’ Gilbert said, casting a doubtful look over a wrecked Kara. In the hierarchy of Balniddrie – although pecking-order might be a more accurate term – Kara was the unacknowledged leader. The goat to be killed, it transpired, was a little billy-kid because, Jill explained, ‘Billy-kids are no use for anything.’
‘I didn’t know we got executed if we weren’t of any use,’ Terri said. ‘I didn’t realize
usefulness
was the criterion by which we lived or died.’ (Quite a long sentence for Terri.)
‘We’re not talking about people, we’re talking about
goats
,’ Kara said.
‘Goats, people – what’s the difference?’ Terri said, looking as if she was about to stab Kara with her parasol.
‘It’ll be a humane killing,’ Jill said in an attempt to mollify Terri. ‘Miranda’s going to do it, she’s the—’
‘That would be a real place, would it?’ Jill scoffed. ‘The Palace of Callyshite?’
‘Calysveron,’ Kevin corrected her. ‘Real as anything else.’
‘Real as this table?’ Jill quizzed. Kevin scrutinized the table as if he was thinking of buying it and finally said, ‘Yes, as real as this table.’ This dialogue would have gone on longer and grown more tedious (although the premise was interesting) if the child hadn’t set off round the kitchen again, at the same hectic pace as before and yet again screaming for dear life. This time it made a beeline for the Aga and was saved at the last minute from immolating itself by a modified rugby tackle from Gilbert. Perhaps they could substitute the girl for the goat in whatever Satanic ritual they were planning for later. A kid for a kid.
Adjacent to the garden was a bumpy field full of some kind of mutant thistle that hadn’t died down in the winter cold. This was where the goats lived when they weren’t shut up for the night in a pig-pen. They were Anglo-Nubians, with floppy rabbit ears and devil-eyes – two nannies and two kids, a big one and a little one, this latter presumably the subject of tonight’s sacrifice.
‘Poor baby,’ Terri said, attempting to kiss it.
Although a little downcast, the goats were quite friendly, certainly friendlier than the chickens, and so we spent some time petting and commiserating until a genuine kind of darkness fell and it grew too cold to be standing around in a field so we made our way back to the kitchen from which was emanating an unappetizing aroma.